Using AMOS tool for language pack translation

AMOS does not update lang packs every hour

I don't know if it is a problem with AMOS. I translated some strings in the german language pack de and I tried to get the new strings into my test moodle. I read about the fact that the server generates a new package every hour at xx:45. The last few hours the server did definitly not!

Do you know if the documentation is wrong? Do you know if there is a problem with the server?

Ralf

From the moodle docs:

Language pack maintainers have write access into the AMOS strings repository. Therefore they can commit their stage permanently. Once the stage is committed, staged strings are stored in the AMOS repository. Every hour at xx:45, AMOS generates ZIP packages from the most recent snapshot of the repository. These ZIP packages are published at http://download.moodle.org/langpack/2.0/ for download. Moodle sites can install and update language packages automatically from the Site administration > Language > Language packs page.

I think that the server http://lang.moodle.org has some problems. I got the mails from this forum thread today on 7th July 2011, 01:30. As you can see we wrote the messages on 5th July 2011, 11:03 and 13:55.

Oh yes I forgot to announce it here, sorry. AMOS now generates ZIPs every 3 hours. The job itself is pretty time consuming, it takes like 10 minutes per Moodle branch. And now when we have to maintain lang packs for four branches (2.0 - 2.3), the job was running almost constantly. Please note that the footer of the language stats page at the download server contains the time stamp of when the packs were updated.

Well, the cronjob definition is 45 */3 * * * which means it starts every day on 00:45, 03:45, 06:45 etc. (UTC). Then it takes approx. 45 minutes to finish so the new packs are available at download.moodle.org at 01:30, 04:30, 07:30 etc. (again UTC). Look at the footer of http://download.moodle.org/langpack/2.3/ - it shows you when the page was generated.

This allowed us to schedule rebuilding ZIP packages every hour again. From now on, the job is executed at the beginning of every hour (at xx:00) and once it finishes, ZIPs are available at the usual location.

This improvement might also increase the overall performance of AMOS a bit as the site does not need to spend valuable resources on generating ZIPs for most of the time now. But this also means we must fix the documentation of this everywhere again